Rhetoric and public address
Race, gender, and culture
Political communication

Research Interests:

As an undergraduate student, Dr. Monika Alston-Miller stumbled upon the work of Maria W. Stewart (1805-1879) which sparked her interest in the political rhetoric of Black women in the United States. She pursued her graduate degrees at Penn State University to learn more about Stewart and expand on a growing interest in public speaking that started with her work as a peer consultant in the University of Richmond Speech Center. Her research during graduate school expanded from Stewart to contemporary Black women in politics like Shirley Chisholm, Barbara Lee, and Carol Moseley-Braun. Dr. A has presented her research on these women for a variety of national and regional conferences, and she has written profiles on a number of women in politics for the Oxford University project African American Lives and Sage’s Encyclopedia of Political Communication. She is presently completing articles on Maria Stewart and the African American verbal tradition of call-response. She looks forward to learning more about and writing on women in Arkansas politics in the near future.